The Verge

Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music game it acquired in July of last year, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. In a message displayed on Heardle’s website, Spotify says the game is going away for good on May 5th.“Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,” the message reads. “From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.” Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge Despite taking inspiration from Wordle — the word guessing game that took the internet by storm — Heardle is still pretty unique, serving as a fun way to put your music knowledge to the test. The game gives you six tries to guess the name of a song as you listen to progressively longer snippets of the track.I... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Parler, a self-described “unbiased” alternative to mainstream social media networks, is being purchased by a company that will temporarily shut down the platform ahead of a planned relaunch. A statement posted to Parler’s website on Friday reveals that its parent company Parlement Technologies has agreed to sell the platform to digital media company Starboard (previously known as Olympic Media) for an undisclosed sum, with the deal expected to be finalized by “the end of Q2, 2023.”Starboard disclosed that the platform will be pulled to undergo a “strategic assessment,” and it suggested Parlement had made the right move in pivoting to cloud services last year. “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is... Continue reading…

Nicolas Cage as Dracula. | Image: Universal Save for Nicolas Cage’s over-the-top Dracula, almost nothing about Universal’s Renfield really works the way it could. Continue reading…

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge Sling TV is finally making its way to Amazon Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 10 devices — nearly two years after Amazon first promised that it would bring the app to all the Echo Show devices in its lineup.While Amazon did manage to bring Sling TV to the Echo Show 15 last year, it never came to its other devices until now. The newly added Sling TV app makes it possible to stream live TV and on-demand content straight from the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 10.Sling TV has a host of live channels that you can tune in to depending on your subscription plan, including Fox, TBS, ESPN, MLB Network, AMC, Discovery, NBA TV, and more. There’s also a free ad-supported streaming option that you can access called Sling Freestream.It’s nice that Amazon... Continue reading…

A screenshot of Artifact, the new news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. | Image: Artifact Last week, I observed here that journalists have mostly continued to post on Twitter as if everything is normal there. That’s less true today than it was then — good on NPR and PBS for showing some spine and suspending their use of the platform — but there’s no doubt that it continues to be the digital broadcast destination of choice for many or even most reporters.As I noted in that piece, one reason for Twitter’s stickiness is the sense that none its alternatives have yet to reach critical mass. And while that’s clearly true, it’s also the case that there is probably more talent working on new social networks at this point than at any moment since the early 2010s.Mastodon, Post, T2, and the Untitled Meta Social Network are just a... Continue reading…

Image: OpenAI In a discussion about threats posed by AI systems, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, has confirmed that the company is not currently training GPT-5, the presumed successor to its AI language model GPT-4, released this March.Speaking at an event at MIT, Altman was asked about a recent open letter circulated among the tech world that requested that labs like OpenAI pause development of AI systems “more powerful than GPT-4.” The letter highlighted concerns about the safety of future systems but has been criticized by many in the industry, including a number of signatories. Experts disagree about the nature of the threat posed by AI (is it existential or more mundane?) as well as how the industry might go about “pausing” development... Continue reading…

Logan Roy wishes! | Image: PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images Everything’s coming up Murdoch! Succession is back, Dominion Voting Systems won’t drop its suit, and our boy Rupert may be open to further [LCD sound system voice] discovery, discovery, discovery.I am personally thrilled about this trial because I am a longtime Murdoch watcher. I love having more details about Rupert et al. blasted into the public sphere. This family, which owns News Corp, lurks over American journalism like Dracula’s brides over Jonathan Harker. This defamation suit is maybe the most serious challenge to their power in America I’ve seen so far.Winning a defamation case is hard and expensive; usually people settleThe central claim of Dominion’s $1.6 billion suit is that Fox executives and hosts knew that the election... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter Blue subscribers now have a maximum tweet length of 10,000 characters and support for bold and italic text formatting. The announcement comes just weeks after the character limit for Twitter Blue was first bumped up from 280 characters to 4,000 back in February, with the latest increase and additional formatting features seemingly designed to help Twitter compete with newsletter platforms like Substack — which has recently found itself in Elon Musk’s crosshairs.This isn’t the first time Twitter has introduced long-form writing features. The company — under previous leadership — was testing a new Notes feature for writers and had previously purchased the Revue newsletter firm in 2021, which served as a rival to Substack. Both of... Continue reading…

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Hackers who claim to have breached Western Digital have reportedly stolen around 10 terabytes of data from the company and are holding it hostage. TechCrunch spoke to the hackers who appear to have control over Western Digital’s code-signing certificate, private phone numbers belonging to company executives, stolen SAP Backoffice data, and even managed to gain administrator access to Western Digital’s Microsoft Azure instance.Western Digital reported a “network security incident” earlier this month that allowed an “unauthorized third party” to access data from the company’s systems. The incident put Western Digital’s cloud network out of action for 10 days, and the company only just managed to bring its My Cloud service back online e... Continue reading…

A drone view of the giant wiper blade stretched across Cybertruck’s windshield. | Screenshot from video by Brad Sloan. A new drone video has surfaced showing the Cybertruck’s ridiculously large windshield wiper in action. And you know what? It’s functional — and perhaps improved — but still doesn’t reach a good chunk of the glass in front of the passenger.The video shot by Brad Sloan above Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory location on Thursday (and surfaced by Electrek) shows the Cybertruck undergoing a wind tunnel test. At the 13:42 mark you can see the truck’s single XL wiper blade start moving, with decent reach across the majority of windshield. Maybe it’s the angle, but it does seem like an improvement over some prototypes we’ve seen.The Cybertruck’s giant windshield was one of the electric pickup’s most distinctive features when it was unveiled in 2019.... Continue reading…

Nintendo Game Boy, Lego edition — not authorized by Lego or Nintendo. | Image: Nick Lever Nick Lever, video editor and Lego Masters Australia finalist, has recreated the original Nintendo Game Boy in bricks — and with such droolworthy depth that I hereby petition Lego to make it into an official set.It’s just 364 pieces, only 115 different parts, most of them common enough you can find ‘em dirt cheap. Almost every recognizable facet of the Game Boy is represented, from the angled rice-grain Start / Select buttons to the distinctive tint of the screen — achieved here by placing lime green tiles underneath a trans-blue window.While there’s no removable battery tray or front speaker, you can indeed press down on the D-pad and click in a “cartridge.” You might want to take a close look at those A and B buttons, too... ... Continue reading…

Image: Bungie Bungie is the latest online game developer to announce it’ll start monitoring, warning, and even banning Destiny 2 players who use controller-spoofing XIM hardware or similar to cheat. The company told The Verge in February that it was investigating ways to combat cheaters, and now its policy is drawing a clear line on what won’t be allowed. The move comes as other big online games, from Call of Duty to Overwatch, are also adopting methods to try to detect the hardware and either mess with or outright ban players using them.In its blog post today, Bungie notes that “external aides” are a problem that the community is growing frustrated with — while avoiding actually mentioning the names of the devices to deter spotlighting them.The... Continue reading…

The $599 Creality K1. | Image: Creality 3D printers can take hours or even days to produce simple parts — but it only took two weeks for the biggest names in consumer 3D printing to declare that era is over.On March 29th, Prusa announced the $799 Prusa MK4, its first new printer in four years. The company boasts it can print a “draft mode” 3DBenchy boat in under 20 minutes, four times faster than the 80 minutes it took with the previous generation. Image: Prusa The Prusa MK4 has a new mainboard, firmware, quick-swap nozzles, load cell sensor for a “perfectly smooth first layer without user interaction,” LCD screen, more precise stepper motors, and more. On April 8th, Anker responded by doubling the speed of its already fast 250mm/s printer to... Continue reading…

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Law enforcement officials have linked a trove of classified government documents leaked on Discord to a 21-year-old Air Force National Guard member, as reported earlier by NBC News. The suspect, Jack Teixeira, was arrested at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday.“Today, the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.The Pentagon first discovered the sensitive documents posted to Discord, Twitter, Telegram, and 4chan last week. The leaks revealed details about the Russia-Ukraine war along with information about the US’s... Continue reading…

Rocksteady Studios You could be forgiven at this point for not believing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is ever coming out. Rocksteady Studios, of Batman: Arkham series fame, has delayed the game yet again. This is the second time the game has been delayed this year and the third overall, taking the release date from 2022 to May 26th, 2023, to some later date in 2023 to, now, February 2nd, 2024.Earlier this year, Suicide Squad was heavily featured in Sony’s February State of Play. It was the first time players had an up-close look at the gameplay, and they were... less than enthused. Turns out, an always online, live service shooter with a battle pass is just not what people want right now. Who’da thunk?According to the announcement, Rocksteady... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google Chat is getting a new look that matches the redesigned interfaces of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Gmail. Like the makeovers it rolled out to its other Workspace apps, this one is also based on Google’s Material Design 3 system.As you can see in the below GIF, you’ll notice some small tweaks to the entire interface, including rounded buttons (and a rounded search bar), along with some blue accents throughout. There have also been some minor changes to the main message view, compose setup, new topic button, and the thread panel within direct messages and spaces. Image: Google Earlier this week, Google also announced a new Chat feature that lets Space Managers create announcement-only channels, sort... Continue reading…

Illustration by Will Joel / The Verge Otter.ai is one of the more popular machine-powered transcription apps — and it’s easy to see why. Its algorithms do a good job of transcribing speech, including differentiating and identifying the people speaking. And if you use its Otter Assistant feature, it will attach to your calendar and automatically transcribe Zoom, Teams, and Meet meetings that are on that calendar — even if you don’t attend.While that could be handy — if your boss asks you what happened at a meeting, you can have the info even if you were playing Wordle at the time — it could also be a problem. For example, what if you forgot (or didn’t notice) that the automatic function was on, and it recorded a meeting that might contain sensitive information or was... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is rebranding its “Super Follows” feature, which lets you subscribe to individual users to get access to some exclusive content, to just “Subscriptions.” Twitter owner Elon Musk promoted the feature on Thursday, noting that you can find it in the “Monetization” section of settings.Super Follows were first announced in February 2021, and as far as we can tell, the rebranded Subscriptions have many of the same features. With Subscriptions, you can charge users so they can get access to things like exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Spaces, and special subscriber badges. Down the line, Twitter says that it hopes to include “newsletters and other Twitter features as potential bonus content.”That line about newsletters makes this... Continue reading…

What’s new out there? | Image: Nintendo We’re less than a month away from the launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and even though we just got a new trailer jam-packed with details, there’s still so much we don’t know about the game.Here are a few concrete things I can point to after watching all of the released footage more times than I care to admit:

Image: Nexon Fans don’t seem interested, but that isn’t stopping some notable brands. Continue reading…

The group chat is “a hallowed thing.” | Image: The Verge Izzy Miller downloaded 500,000 messages from his seven-year group chat, then trained an AI language model to replicate his friends — learning details about their lives and imitating the way they speak. Continue reading…

Image: Crunchyroll Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume is his most exuberant movie yet and a powerful rumination on holding space for the past. Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Screenshots can be really handy. You can use them to show your grandparent how to use a new app. You can use them to send a shot of a strange error message to your company’s IT department. And you can use them to capture tweets before they disappear into the black hole of deletion. So, in case you need to capture a screenshot or two, here’s a quick and simple guide to taking screenshots on your PC.Windows 10 introduced a screenshot tool called Snip & Sketch, but Windows 11 relies on the simpler Snipping Tool. And there are other ways you can take screenshots as well. We’ll start with the simplest.Use the PrintScreen keyUntil recently, if you wanted to take a quick screenshot of your entire screen, you could either just press the Print... Continue reading…

Nintendo At T-minus one day less than a month until Tears of the Kingdom launches, Nintendo has released a final trailer for Breath of the Wild’s potentially life-ruining sequel.The three-minute trailer featured sweeping vistas of Hyrule, some new friendly faces, and one very old not-so-friendly face. It looks like Link will have some friends to help him along the way, like he did in Breath of the Wild, which is neat because exploring all of Hyrule alone can get pretty boring. It also looks like my girl Riju is back and all grown up, along with Prince Sidon, so I am very excited to see my old friends again.During the last presentation on TotK, I was a bit bummed that we didn’t get any story beats. There were so many questions surrounding Link’s... Continue reading…

Apple’s HomePod Mini comes in a variety of fun colors, including orange, yellow, and blue. | Image: Jennifer Tuohy / The Verge Believe it or not, May is now just a few weeks away, which means both Mother’s Day and graduation season are nearly upon us. If you plan on picking up a gift for either occasion, it might be wise to get a head start on your shopping now before your calendar fills with festivities.For Apple aficionados, Apple’s Siri-enabled HomePod Mini makes for a versatile gift, one that’s on sale at Costco for members for $79.99 ($20 off) through April 23rd. Non-members can also buy the smart speaker at a discount when they pay a 5 percent surcharge, which raises the final sale price to $83.99 — a price we still rarely see.If you’re already embedded in Apple’s ecosystem, the HomePod Mini will let you do more than just play music and check the... Continue reading…

LG’s G3 OLED hits new brightness highs. | Image: LG LG’s G3 and Samsung’s S95C promise the brightest, most impressive picture we’ve ever seen from OLED TVs — and that’s on top of other advantages like perfect blacks and excellent gaming performance. Continue reading…

Image: Epic Games Fortnite’s push into music continues with its second collaboration with Coachella, and it’s a bit more involved than last year.The music festival will be featured inside of the game in a few different ways. Perhaps most notable is the “Coachella Island” that players can explore, built using the game’s Creative mode, and which features music from Porter Robinson, some mini-games to play, and a virtual merch tent. (The island will be available to check out starting on April 14th at 3PM ET.)Meanwhile, 18 different songs from Coachella artists will be playing on Fortnite’s in-game radio station in the battle royale mode from now until May 12th. There will also be Coachella-themed quests to complete and, since this is Fortnite, a pair of... Continue reading…

Tomohisa Yamashita and Fleur Geffrier in Drops of God. | Image: Apple Everything about Apple’s newest streaming series is extreme — which you can probably tell since it’s a show about wine with the overly dramatic title Drops of God. And yet it works. It takes what may seem like a niche subculture full of snobs and millionaires and turns it into a high-stakes thriller that constantly kept me on edge. I really can’t believe how tense I got watching someone sniff a glass of red wine.Loosely based on a manga of the same name, Drops of God is a story about family and competition. Things really kick off with a death. When world-renowned wine aficionado Alexandre Leger (Stanley Weber) passes away, he leaves behind an incredible inheritance: a cellar packed with 87,000 bottles widely believed to be the most... Continue reading…

A prototype game launcher for Windows. | Image: h0x0d (Twitter) Microsoft is exploring early concepts around a Windows handheld mode for devices like the Steam Deck. A leaked video posted on Twitter by h0x0d shows early concept and prototype work for an optimized Windows 11 UI for handhelds, and a launcher and Windows gaming shell that’s designed for touchscreens and controllers.The video is part of a hackathon project inside Microsoft from September, where employees regularly present ideas or projects that sometimes end up getting support from Microsoft executives and end up shipping.

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has stopped tweeting from its primary Twitter account after it was given a “Government-funded Media” label. As of this writing the @PBS account hasn’t tweeted since April 8th, and the organization has since confirmed that it currently has “no plans” to resume posting to Twitter.“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” PBS spokesman Jason Phelps tells Bloomberg. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.” While PBS isn’t tweeting from its main account, it’s continued to put out content on affiliated accounts like @NewsHour, which have not had the “Government-funded” label applied.“PBS stopped tweeting... Continue reading…

Image: Getty Images The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday subpoenaed the Federal Trade Commission for documents related to its ongoing privacy investigation into Elon Musk’s Twitter, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the committee, authorized the subpoena sent to FTC Chair Lina Khan, accusing the agency of refusing to comply with a handful of other requests the committee has made over the last few months. The demand requires the FTC to hand over all internal communications related to Musk’s October 2022 purchase of Twitter.In his letter to Khan Wednesday, Jordan accused the FTC of making “inappropriate and burdensome demands” of Musk’s Twitter, calling the agency’s responses to past requests for... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge There’s a lot of them Continue reading…

Currents was introduced in 2019. | Image: Google Currents Update April 12th, 2023, 5PM ET: Google announced it will begin winding down Currents on July 5th, with data available for export until August 8th, 2023, when it will no longer be available.Google has announced that it’ll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. In a blog post, the company says it’s “planning to wind down” Currents, and that it’ll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat’s version of a Slack channel or Discord room.Google says that it’s making the change so users won’t have to work in a “separate, siloed destination” — instead, they’ll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. The company... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge The first beta of Google’s Android 14 OS is available to download today, introducing new features focused on system navigation, privacy, performance, and user customization. We already had a good idea of what to expect thanks to the first two developer-only previews, but the beta release is the first opportunity for the general public to test the changes.Gesture navigation has been updated to include a more conspicuous Material You-themed back arrow that adjusts to complement the device’s theme or wallpaper. Aside from arguably being more aesthetically pleasing, the updated back arrow is designed to help users better understand Android 14’s predictive back gesture experience, which now previews the screen users are navigating to within... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Update, April 12th: And here it is — WBD has officially revealed Max, which will launch May 23rd, and we have all the details right here.Warner Bros. Discovery is getting ready to announce its combined HBO Max and Discovery Plus offering it will supposedly call “Max.” The media giant will officially reveal the service during a press event on Wednesday, which will cost up to $16 per month, according to a report from The New York Times.Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav had been planning on bringing the two services together ever since WarnerMedia merged with Discovery last year, and now that time is closely approaching. The combined service will dump Discovery Plus’ eclectic range of content, including Deadliest Catch, Property... Continue reading…